525 Mountain

525 Mountain

I bought an umbrella on Wednesday. White, with a white handle. It’s the kind conscientious women buy when they’re getting married; I suppose it looks good in photos. I was thinking of using it to turn a poem into a sculpture.
This was just after the usual drive to work. I started the trip on the turnpike, in a gray haze that made the buildings and the sky seem like part of the same work in progress. The buildings looked untouchable, yet eerily close at the same time, as if hovering just above my dashboard, barely out of reach. From there, I exited onto Rt. 525, where, for at least 9 months, a crew of men has been either building a mountain or taking it down. Enormous vehicles circle endlessly up and down this giant mound of dirt, and the number of machines in use there increases daily, seemingly exponentially. On Wednesday, there was all of this, plus an airplane.
A good friend of my father’s used to have a plane that he would jump out of nearly every day, at least in the summer. I remember asking him once what it was like to fall through a cloud. He always looked at the uppermost edge of something, like a beach umbrella or a flagpole, in preparation for explaining something this important. All he could seem to come up with this time was that falling through a cloud is wet. He said that, the first time it happened to him, he thought it had started raining.
Yesterday, on the drive to work, it was raining and it was not raining. It felt like there was a sick student’s spittle suspended in the air all around me. Men in yellow hats had begun building a wall around the mountain, so I was thinking I would never be able to tell just what it was they were doing. For the first time, a red truck with a rainbow colored umbrella above it was parked at the site, selling breakfast sandwiches and hotdogs, so I figured that whatever was going on had to be something important.
When I got home, I watched something on TV about art and craters. Apparently lying in a crater keeps the horizon from seeming too hazy and the center of the sky from seeming too clear. So, if you’re lying on your back in a crater, the sky has the same degree of clarity no matter where you look. With the proper consciousness, said the astronomer who described all of this, this clarity makes you feel unimaginably close to the sky, as if you are in the atmosphere, and one with the universe. He spoke just like an artist, low and slow, only without the hesitation. He looked right at the camera.
This morning, I noticed that they had finally put a sign at the bottom of the 525 mountain, yellow and black, official. It’s tiny, and half hidden behind the wall. I was driving too fast to see it on my way to work.
I quit my job today. My students worked and didn’t work. Mostly, they made plans for the summer. I did everything I could to make sure they looked in the proper place as they painted, but nothing I did was successful.
On the drive home, I slowed down in front of the sign. A woman blared her horn, and the guy at the hotdog stand shook his head at me, wiping earth from his eyes. All I managed to read on the sign was something about a gravel company. So the only conclusion I can come to is that they are selling the mountain. I still don’t know whether they are putting it up or taking it down.